James Kilby

I retired my 7-year-old WatchGuard M200 for the UniFi UDM Beast — the spec, my iperf and WAN tests, the BGP/FRR setup, and what I consolidated onto it.

Automate your Packer vSphere golden-image pipeline: build 6 Ubuntu LTS templates (22.04, 24.04, 26.04) server & desktop flavours with GitHub Actions.

Learn how to automate vSphere power management using Ansible and SemaphoreUI, scheduling ESXi host shutdowns based on Octopus Agile energy tariffs to cut costs.

One Bash script turns a fresh Ubuntu VM into a VCF 9 Offline Depot: Traefik, Nginx, basic auth, and Let's Encrypt wildcard certs via Cloudflare DNS.

Part 2 of my self-hosted AI stack series.

We’ve expanded the VMC fleet with the new i7i (i7i.

How I built a fully self-hosted AI stack with Ollama, Open WebUI, n8n, ComfyUI, Qdrant and SearxNG on Docker Compose.

I am quite a heavy consumer of electricity at home.

How I automated my homelab AI infrastructure with Ansible — NVIDIA vGPU passthrough, Docker, Traefik, and Semaphore for end-to-end deployment.

Using VMware Cloud on AWS Content Libraries to deploy ISOs and OVAs to new SDDCs in minutes instead of hours.

I have spent the Christmas break making some improvements to this blog.

Step-by-step Ubuntu disk expansion with LVM: pvresize, vgextend, lvextend, resize2fs.

How to configure Time Sync and NTP in VMware Cloud on AWS using the Amazon Time Sync Service — setup, firewall rules, and troubleshooting tips.

As can be seen on my Lab Overview page.

How I deploy my blog as a static site using GitHub Actions and Cloudflare — the WordPress API, build pipeline, Slack notifications, and comments setup.

How I use SemaphoreUI as the web frontend for Ansible, Terraform and PowerShell in my homelab.

A full side-by-side comparison of every VMware Cloud on AWS host type — I3.metal, I3en.metal and I4i.metal — covering CPU, memory, storage and networking specs.

VMware Cloud on AWS storage sizing reference: usable TiB by host count for i3i, i3en, and i4i, plus the FTT/RAID policy used at each cluster size.

Warp is helping me run my homelab.

How I migrated my saved articles from Pocket to Hoarder (now Karakeep), self-hosted it with Docker, and added AI tagging to organise everything.